film studies at the university of colorado boulder.
Historical and material approaches to the reuse, reformation and reconstitution of existing sources from Cubism to PostModernism. Originality, appropriation, authorship, intellectual property, found footage, home movies, readymades, remixes, copyleft and free culture.

Friday, February 19, 2010

exquisite corpse

still from REMOVED (1999) by Naomi Uman

here is our exquisitely distressed destroyed corpse of a collaborative film project--we started with a movie called JUNKYARD and each person had a section to alter in any way they saw fit, a result of various experiments we have been making with the film material over the last month. I am so glad we can watch it again and again--there aer so many details I missed during the screening! Who did that contact printing?? Maybe each person can discuss their particular section and methods? Yay.Oh, and here are a couple other class collaboratives, one from The New School in 2008 and one from Boulder2009.

After watching our project, we projected Naomi Uman's 1999 film REMOVED where she used nail polish and bleach selectively on a found piece of Italian soft-core. This film shows up on several DVD compilations, most importantly on the ILLEGAL ART dvd collection (a project related to STAYFREE magazine). You can buy the dvd or download/stream and watch here.

Man, that washing machine stuff was so awesome. I'm backing that. Was it a dishwasher or a washing machine? I wonder what either/or would produce...

I did the contact printing/bi-packing stuff. I got my strip and noticed that the motions were mechanical (obviously so, the subjects were a backhoe and bulldozer), so I tried to think of a process that somehow could take the formulated motions of the image and mess with 'em... so I used a contact print/photogram.

I wanted it to start really spot on, as in, each frame would line up directly with the stock I was printing onto, and then as the strip went on, I wanted it to become more indecipherable and fade out. So, to do that, I used a splicer to line up the sprocket holes in the beginning and let the film sort of "lead itself" as the print stock fell further and further away from the image it was supposed to be replicating.Turned out pretty smooth! Definitely doing more of this stuff for the final film and beyond, I like the photogram process a lot.

*The Boulder video wouldn't work for me either.. but the New School one looks pretty sweet!

I used mostly scratch/painting methods for my segment, early-midway into our reconstituted film. I did a lot of frame counting, with recurring images every so-many frames, and some hidden text; I could not make out many of these details on our first screening, but they are more apparent upon watching the video on the blog.I enjoyed seeing everyone's contributions fused together. The process of splicing this film together, however, turned out to be quite a lesson in why collabrative organization is a good idea.

i will say that i loved the washing machine section because it gave the film a sickly, old, green effect which worked very well with the content. I also really loved the bi-packed section. that to me just looked totally awesome.

as for my section, i spray painted and put white nail polish and blue sparkly nail polish on my strip. I personally liked the way the sparkly nail polish came out.

Kevin's dishwasher section was awesome! I'm a big fan of that type of random film manipulation, you never know what your going to get.My section is from around 2:15 to 2:30. I started at the tail end of the strip, I bleached sections of 3 frames separated by 8 frames that i later applied food coloring to. I tried to get a sense of what the images I was working with before I went at the film with a variety of x-acto blades. This was the first time I have really spent any serious time scratching colored film, and I have to say I absolutely love it. Using a minimal amount of pressure I found I could scrap the emulsion off in layers, giving the scratched area a really nice green or yellow tint.I also want to give props to Hogan, having a few pages in my film note book that look similar to his(not nearly as much math involved in mine) I have a great deal of respect for the amount of work that goes into that. In a film surrounded by manipulation his section really stands out to me.